January 23, 1999
Dear Folks,
Have you ever noticed that entropy travels in waves? Things don’t fall apart in a steady or random pattern; rather when one thing breaks down, somehow the disorder is catching, and all sorts of other things break down, and you find yourself doing nothing but running around trying to get things fixed.
Maybe this phenomenon is only noticed by Enneagram Ones, who are driven CRAZY by unfixed things. Maybe I suffer more than most, because I never properly learned to fix things — mechanical things, anyway — I actually don’t much care about, empathize with, understand or want to spend my life messing with mechanical things. So when these things break, I am at the mercy not only of repair-people of varying skill, trustworthiness, and expense, but also of the Market System, which does not make it easy for people to repair things when what they should be doing is going out and Buying New Ones to Make the Economy Grow. A mandate that I resist, of course, if I possibly can.
So I am at the moment plagued with a breakdown wave that began, if my memory serves me, with our kitchen stove, which a Sears repairman pronounced terminal about six months ago. Something went awry in its control box, and strange things started happening. The “automatic” lock that holds the oven door shut for the self-cleaning cycle (which we never use) suddenly locked itself one day and wouldn’t let go. (It was the day before Kerry & Stephen’s wedding, when I had a dozen loaves of bread to bake — finally Scot came over, took the door off and permanently removed the lock.) The panel light went on and off sporadically, so we had to bang it to see how hot the oven was. Knobs fell off, so we had to adjust the oven temperature by turning a recessed screw with a knife blade. The repair guy said it would cost more to replace the control box than to buy a new stove, so we lived with all these defects until I couldn’t stand it any more and bought a new stove.
I thought that would knock one item off the “to fix” list, but the new stove is exactly 3/8” wider than the old one, so at this very moment a local carpenter is trying to figure out how to shave 3/8” from the tile-covered kitchen counter.
My CD player has also developed an intermittent failure (the worst kind to figure out), which occasionally cuts out one of the speakers, and that REALLY drives me crazy. I’ve checked the speaker connections, I think the problem is in the amplifier, and I know just what I’m going to hear when I take it in — too expensive to repair; buy a new one. My gosh, lady, that CD player is 11 years old! The new ones have all these great bells and whistles (which I don’t need, don’t want, and won’t be able to avoid.)
My beat-up farm truck, an overworked, underappreciated member of the family that does snowplowing, hay-hauling, firewood-toting, and much other heavy lifting, lost its ability to go into four-wheel drive, so it’s at the shop. There’s a chance that the whole transmission is gone, the guy says. If so, fixing it will cost more than the truck is worth.
There’s a slow leak from a water valve in the basement. Some sort of bug is slowing my computer system down to January-molasses speed. A new-age, state-of-the art, programmable thermostat stopped functioning altogether when I replaced its batteries. (I HATE new-age, programmable stuff that requires you to replace batteries in places where batteries were never needed before!) The Foundation Farm sign down by the road blew halfway off in a storm and is dangling by a single chain; getting to it involves setting a ladder into a four-foot-deep snowbank, which no one has dared to try yet. The porch roof is leaking.
And so on. As soon as I take one of these items off the “to fix” list, three more go on.
Grrrrrr! (It’s healthy for Ones to learn to express their anger. And anger is what I feel. The world is NOT SUPPOSED to break down like this!)
Maybe the worst thing broken is something in our beautiful young dog Emmett’s left rear ankle. Given the way he careens around the farm, full speed, bouncing and leaping, absolutely heedless, it wouldn’t be surprising that he somehow managed to put a hairline fracture in a small bone — that’s what the vet thinks, anyway. The joint is trying to repair itself by building up a visible bump of extraneous bone or cartilage or something, and Emmett is limping, but only occasionally, in between bouts of heedless, full-speed bouncing and leaping and careening. “Keep him quiet” the vet says — you might as well tell a summer wind or a dancing wave to keep quiet. The leg is not healing. Unfortunately the next step seems to be a dog orthopedic surgeon in Rutland. (At least the vet doesn’t try to tell me Emmett’s not worth fixing!)
I find it hard to sleep when something is broken, especially something living. So in my sleepless nights I’m reflecting on the law of entropy, wishing I were one of those people with a knack for fixing things, and remembering that there’s a systems law that applies here — the more capital you have, the more depreciation you have. I am getting impatient to get rid of 90% of my stuff and move to my new home, where my personal living space will be so small I can’t own much, and where the care and expense of repairing things like trucks and stoves will be shared among many families — some of which, I hope, will contain geniuses at fixing things.
Blessings on people who are geniuses at fixing things! We need more of them. They ought to start schools. Maybe that’s something the Sustainability Institute can arrange to do.
Well, enough griping about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thanks for listening.
January finally gave us a wallop of Real Winter, so we all feel much better. We’ve had days when it never got about zero, and we’ve weathered about five back-to-back storms that piled up plenty of white stuff. The skiers would be happy, except that each of the storms ended as freezing rain that added one more layer of crust. And today it’s 40 degrees and raining buckets, washing the snow downhill, raising the rivers toward flood. Don’t know whether this is a normal January thaw or a return to the greenhouse-warming pattern we saw through much of December.
Isn’t it awful to have to watch the weather with dread, wondering if it’s broken for good?
One more thing I can’t fix.
I AM depressed, aren’t I? I wrote a totally despairing column this month, something I rarely let myself do. I wonder what’s going on with me? Normal dark-season, teaching-term irritability? Too little exercise now that the garden’s shut down? Coming down with flu? The endless, awful impeachment process? (Now THAT’S depressing!) The steady beat of bad news from the biosphere?
Whatever it is, my usual reaction to any mood is to have it full out until I wear it out, so pardon me for wallowing in gloom here. At least I don’t do it very often.
Jen and Ben have moved to their own place in Hartland, a good move both for them and for us. They’ll be nearer work (at Simon Pearce glass-blowing), able to share the rent with Jen’s brother Andre, and able to have loud parties unrestrained, which they couldn’t around here. They’re just a bit too young and footloose to fit in with this purposeful household; when they aren’t working they want to go swimming or to a Phish concert, not weed the garden or take the garbage out (though Jen was terrific at cleaning, when she was around to do it). I understand — I remember being that carefree myself — I think young people should be — and I like them both. But it’s hard to have widely varying degrees of commitment and responsibility in community, and as I get older, I get increasing tired of mothering people. So they’ll form their own household and Jen will be the mother and be good at it.
So — end of one more interesting phase of Foundation Farm. We learned a lot about glass-blowing and vegan cooking (and potting and Mississippi and blueberries and the car business in Claremont) from Jen and Ben. We learn from everyone who comes here. Meanwhile Stephen and Kerry and Jim (and Ariane on school holidays) seem to be a happy combination, so I’m in no hurry to fill up the empty room again. (Ariane gave me the sheet music for Beethoven’s “Primavera” violin sonata for Christmas, so she and I are having fun learning to play it together.)
On the new community (Cobb Hill) front I feel a bit distant, since I have to pull back during teaching term. We’re assembling our Act 250 application, my part of which seems to be to conduct a traffic study, so we can convince the state that we will not cause such undue traffic as to require road-widening or to endanger safety. I think this means we have to do a 14-hour actual traffic count on Mace Hill Road, which I will organize with the help of my friends. Since at least half of us will work on the farm, at the Sustainability Institute, or at home, and many of the rest of us will carpool, and we’ll get most of our food and energy right from the farm, I think I can make a case that our traffic impact will be minimal.
Ever since we struck a dry water hole last month, people have been saying to me, “but why didn’t you get a dowser?” The reason why is that some in our group have a certain, um, lack of faith in dowsers. But after an $8000 dry hole, some of the rest of us developed a lack of faith in hydrologists. So we called Danville VT, the world dowsing center, where the dowsers have their annual convention every summer, and brought down one Paul Sevigny, a 79-year-old master dowser who has brought in, he says 3860 successful wells. “I’ve saved a lot of people a lot of money.” He agreed to come down for $22 in gas plus whatever we want to donate to charities for children. Lots cheaper than a hydrologist. But then the dowser-skeptics say, quoting an old Persian proverb, “You buy cheap, you buy junk.”
Mr. Sevigny showed up one bright 20-below morning in a light jacket and baseball cap and no gloves. The rest of us, wrapped in many layers, traipsed out across the Hunt farm with him. “How much water you need?” he asked. We said at least 20 gallons per minute. “I’ll skip over all the small stuff then,” he said.
He held a bent metal rod in each hand, ends sticking straight out in front of him. When he hit a vein they moved away from each other to point sideways; when he got to the other end of the vein, they moved back again. “Twenty-seven gallons a minute, 166 feet down,” he pronounced when he got to the first vein, about 6 feet from the next spot our hydrologist intended to drill. “The vein runs this direction, so be sure the drilling truck lines up like THIS. If you get to 200 feet and they find nothing, it means they didn’t drill straight, but they’re just a few feet off, so do a hydro-frac, and you’ll open the vein just fine.”
Well, in science that’s what we call a nice, clean disprovable hypothesis. This guy sounded unshakably sure of himself.
He found another vein that really excited us, because it was right by our intended building site, 36 gallons a minute, 216 feet down. “Water quality 3 on a scale of 10, where 1 is perfect,” said the dowser. “This is the best site on the hill, there’s nothing higher than this.” (Our failed hole was up higher, as is the third site picked by the hydrologist.) By this time Mr. Sevigny, who is as frail as a fall leaf about to blow off the tree, was shivering, so we hustled him inside for hot cocoa, and he told us war stories and interesting stuff about dowsing. He doesn’t need the metal rods to dowse, he said, “but people would think I was REALLY crazy if I didn’t use them!” He dowses for lost pets and people. He dowses on maps — he has found wells in Texas without ever leaving Danville. Dowsing does not work as a party game or to show off. “You have to really need to know the answer, or you don’t get a straight answer,” he said.
The community was left with the choice of drilling at the site where the hydrologist and dowser agreed (which, if there’s water there, will preserve all our worldviews) or drilling at the spot that only the dowser specified. I’m sorry to say we chose the first of those options, not so much because it preserved all worldviews, but more because we were already permitted to drill there and had bulldozed access for the drilling truck. (I’m sorry because I was ITCHING to test out that dowser’s surety and specificity — and because the site he chose was farther from neighbor’s wells, and so, if it proved out, would require way less testing to be sure we’re not impacting them.)
And the result?
Well, as of this writing we haven’t exactly preserved anyone’s worldviews. They drilled last week, went down 500 feet, and found 6.5 gallons/min at 375 feet — not what the dowser said, and not nearly enough for a community of 22 families. Why did they go beyond 200 feet? I wouldn’t have. I would have hydro-fracted, as the dowser told us to do. But this operation seems to be inextricably in the hands of the pro-hydrologist faction, not the pro-dowser faction. I have no idea what will happen next. Stay tuned.
One of these days I want to learn to dowse.
On the Sustainability Institute front, I’m writing our first annual report in preparation for a February board meeting. The commodity research goes forward and keeps getting ever more fascinating. I think I’m getting a glimmer now of the generic model we can use to fashion an interactive game — where we can plug in fish or cocoa trees or bananas or wheat or Douglas firs (with very different regeneration times) and different processing plants and distribution chain lengths and begin to explore the full range of possible behaviors of commodity chains — and their reaction to “green” markets or trade quotas or price subsidies or whatever. This stuff is so cool!
The Environmental Ethics class at Dartmouth has started, and as usual, while resenting all the time they take and all the grammatical mistakes they make in their papers, I’m in love with the students. This happens every year. I say to myself, why spend so much time with so few people, why not work on a book that can sell thousands of copies or a column that can be printed in the millions? And then I meet them and know why. My columns and books can’t talk back to me. They can’t challenge me, ask impertinent questions, or put entirely new thoughts into my head. And they don’t have beautiful souls they can open to me. Or set up a human relationship that can go on for years, as I watch them go out and do great things with their lives.
So in my class this year are a young woman from India, another from Thailand, and a young man from Nepal, as well as the usual red-blooded outdoorsy Americans. I get to discuss all my favorite readings with them — Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man,” Garret Hardin and Herman Daly and E.F. Schumacher, Ishmael and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. I lay out all these treasures before them, and I get to watch their minds turn on and their eyes shine.
Maybe I ought to do more teaching.
Well, my sourdough has been rising and is probably about ready for the oven. I have to go stoke some logs into the wood furnace and (sigh) grade papers. (Maybe I ought NOT to do more teaching!) Ariane’s going to want to play music soon, and there’s laundry to do, and maybe I can find some time to try to fix something.
Love,
Dana
P.S. The farm scene Stephen drew for you this month gives you an inclusive view of our farmyard, roughly as seen from the back porch.
In front is the bird feeder, with typical visitors: mourning dove, goldfinch, and squirrel.
The four cats are (reading left to right), fat Jimmy, who’s on a diet and has lost a pound and a half but who’s still fat, old grizzled Simon, skinny mischievous Latte, and skittery Kitty.
Next comes me, in my old chore jacket and snowboots, on the way back from the chicken house with a basket of eggs. I’m holding the gander, who has become something of a pet, following us around the yard like a dog. There is a strong movement in the household (neither started nor endorsed by me) to name the gander Dennis.
On my right is coy Rudy, doing her wolfish submission dance. On my left is Emmett, doing his joyful dominance bounce.
Behind are the five calves — Linden, Butternut, Maple, Alder, and Birch — and three horses — Cassima, Mari, and Bill — and the barn and the Chicken Palace and the bare orchard trees with still a few apples hanging and the woods.
That crow in there is looking for spilled corn to steal. So is the mouse.
